Fantasy author’s latest a ‘Misery’ for modern day

Meg Elison’s star has been on the rise in the science fiction and fantasy field for the past decade. In 2014, her debut novel, “The Book of the Unnamed Midwife,” won the Philip K. Dick Award for best original paperback. Since then, the UC Berkeley graduate has received several nominations and honorable mentions for other awards, including the Otherwise, Nebula and Hugo.

Most recently she won a 2021 Locus Award for “The Pill,” a novelette that first

All of Elison’s writing to date has a strong feminist ethos and covers issues of power, violence and control of the body. Her protagonists are often women or girls who find themselves fighting for safety, self-love and autonomy in toxic environments. But perhaps no protagonist she has written to date has had to fight as hard as this one. Elison’s vivid writing and unflinching attention to detail makes this ordeal very real.

On a final note, it should be said that while “Number One Fan” is not the first or the only crime novel ever to be set in the science fiction and fantasy community, it is by far the best. Murder mysteries like Sharyn McCrumb’s “Bimbos of the Death Sun” have taken a cutesy, comedic stance, wasting time and deflating tension by playing sci-fi fandom and all its “zany characters” as a joke. Elison’s novel rises above its predecessors because her villain, an amalgamation of several wellknown “missing stairs” in the genre, is taken seriously as a threat.

Elison depicts fandom as a dangerous place, where real people get hurt and real lives are destroyed. What makes the book so scary is that she’s right.